An internship with Oxfam.
Started: June 2018
Finished: August 2018
I managed to secure an internship with Oxfam's HQ, due to my live project with them in second year of university.
As a textile artist, it is important to consider the environment whenever I design something and making sure the product has been created and will be used in the most sustainable way. Oxfam being a non profit organisation relied on donations from people to be sold on their online shop which meant we were preventing something that was perfectly fine to pollute the earth in a landfill as well as upcycling it and turning it into something else.
This particular Oxfam centre I volunteered at collected all the clothes from the smaller high street Oxfam shops - so part of my job was to create moodboards of what was currently on trend/going to be on trend. This was so the workers in the factory - who were sorting all the bags of textiles coming through the door could pull out garments we particularly wanted to list online.
As I was responsible for all of the homeware e-commerce, I focused on making moodboards for the home and for colour trends.
Below is one of the moodboards I made. Because retro was coming back in, some of the finds that we were receiving from some of the people who donate to charity shops, were spot on for the aesthetic we wanted.
When the garments and home items came through to our department, we sorted them again into what was a priority to put on sale and what could wait. For me, this involved sorting and prioritising the home section, photographing what needed to go online, editing the photos, pricing and processing them so they could go live. As well as this, I created a carousel of fifteen items each week with a theme to be featured on the home page.
During my time, I upcycled a silk scarf into a pair of shorts for the summer which could be sold online or at a festival. I wrote a how to guide on making them too.
Upcycling was important for Oxfam, as everything is second hand they wanted to encourage people to make something new and think of the possibilities an old thing could be turned into! I found this was a great selling point when we only had one curtain and how they could turn this decent piece of fabric it into something else.
Each week the team of volunteers had to report back to the manager during the group meetings how much they earned that week. I loved finding out what they were going to spend the weeks earning on whether it is to feed 120 families or buy 50 goats for a village.
Oxfam was a lovely start to my placement year as I was able to see how a non profit organisation worked and what really happened to the things people donate to charity shops on the high streets, as well as selling second hand pieces of textiles to a good home!